The State Of The Trail And Parks In Sioux Falls – KELOLAND TV

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – With the weather warming up, people want to break out of the house and enjoy the great outdoors.

In Sioux Falls, going to the park could get you into some trouble if you don’t know which ones are closed.

More than a dozen locations around town are off limits and police officers are handing out citations to anyone who ignores barricades.

Spring in Sioux Falls Parks and along the trail system usually means a lot of runners, bikers and families out and about for fun events and exercise.

“It’s incredibly difficult to be honest,” runner Jess Speckmeier said.

However, you won’t see activity like this for a while.

Jess Speckmeier is an avid runner who loves hitting the trails that are now closed because of historic flooding.

“Now that it’s finally warming up, we can finally get outside. Not having access to the trails is incredibly unfortunate,” Speckmeier said.

She understands why they’re barricaded though and says the closures are having a big impact.

Speckmeier is a volunteer for the upcoming Chilly Cheeks event on April 6th and the organizer of the Remember The Fallen 5K. Chilly Cheeks is having to find a new location because Riverdale Park is currently closed.

“There’s a lot of time and effort and a lot of money that goes into actually hosting these events so trying to cancel at last minute is unfortunate. Postponing it to another date and time just usually isn’t financially feasible for the event itself,” Speckmeier said.

Kelby Mieras is the Park Operations Manager for the City of Sioux Falls. He says many of the parks along the river are shut down for safety reasons.

“So the typical condition of the park that they were used to before the flooding doesn’t exist right now,” Mieras said.

We met Mieras as Pasley Park. The entrance is blocked by not only signs but water. He says the closed parks in town have a lot of issues.

“Some of the split rail fencing was knocked over, some signs were knocked over. Really the level of damage, we haven’t been able to fully assess because we haven’t been able to access those things,” Mieras said.

As city crews prepare for another flood event, Mieras says the parks on the closed list will remain that way as teams sandbag certain areas and monitor the situation.

“I’ve been with the City for almost 17 years and this is the first time I’ve ever seen the Tuthill warming house get water in it and it’s a long ways from the Big Sioux River. This is definitely unprecedented in my time but the parks and recreation team has pulled together and doing an outstanding job doing what we can to protect the public and clean up as we can,” Mieras said.

The visuals from the recent flood tell the story. Mieras says this bridge that washed away at the currently closed Dunham Park has been found nearby.

The trail along the closed Downtown River Greenway is also still covered by water in many spots.

“We’re used to some normal spring flooding localized in different areas but to have pretty much the entire trail system flooded and closed down like this is nothing like I’ve ever seen in all my years I’ve lived here,” Speckmeier said.

Both Speckmeier and Mieras are packing their patience as more flooding is expected this week.

“We are really excited to get into our spring season. We of course know that there are programs within the parks, especially soccer with Yankton Trail, Tomar and Spencer being impacted, that those people definitely want to get out and have their spring season. We’ll do everything we can to get those ready as soon as we can but it’s going to take patience until mother nature has had the chance to melt off all the snow in the region and then we can pick up and go from there,” Mieras said.